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Amy Goldman and Cary Fowler

CENTRAL PARK, April 28, The couple are married atop the Arsenal.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

IT was a passion for seeds that brought Amy P. Goldman and Cary Fowler together, and although their romance began fairly recently, it had been germinating for some time, invisible in both of their lives, like a kernel in the ground.

Dr. Fowler, 62, is the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a group in Rome that helps run the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a bunker in the Arctic in Norway that contains hundreds of thousands of varieties, providing a sort of insurance policy against an agricultural Armageddon.

Dr. Goldman, 58, grew up in a New York real estate family and lives on a 200-acre farm in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She has turned the act of growing heirloom vegetables into an art form, cultivating different kinds for their shapes and colors.

She traces her zeal for those all-but-forgotten varieties to her encounter, albeit indirect, with Dr. Fowler more than 20 years ago, when a friend gave her a copy of his book “Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity.”

The book, which he wrote with Pat Mooney, an environmentalist, strengthened her resolve to focus on the first love of her teenage years, gardening. She had been a competitive gardener at fairs. But his book, which argued that agribusiness was eroding the genetic diversity of the world’s food supply, turned her into an agricultural activist and a seed preservationist.

“I didn’t know we were in the middle of a mass-extinction event in agriculture,” she said. “I didn’t know what an heirloom tomato was. I didn’t realize we’d been losing old varieties left and right. Up until that point, I had never saved a single seed in my life.”

She said she now goes into restaurants armed with plastic bags, “and if I like something, I scoop up the seeds on the plate.”

Her father, the late Sol Goldman, was a landlord and real estate investor who, with a partner, once owned the Chrysler Building. Dr. Goldman, a statuesque brunette, worked in the real estate business for a while but earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and set up a practice. After turning her interest to seeds, she wrote three books: about tomatoes, squash and melons.

Dr. Fowler, born Morgan Carrington Fowler Jr., is lean, with curly ginger hair and the bemused smile of an absent-minded professor. Although he has long lived abroad and was a professor in Norway for many years, he grew up in Memphis, where his father was a judge. He spent summers on his grandmother’s farm in Madison County, Tenn.

As far as their study of seeds goes, the couple do have some differences: Dr. Goldman likes “fruity vegetables,” while Dr. Fowler prefers staples, like rice and wheat.

In 2006, a friend introduced the two by e-mail. They met later that year, when she invited him to be the keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Seed Savers Exchange, which preserves heirloom seeds; she is the chairwoman of the group, which is headquartered in Decorah, Iowa.

The relationship at that point was strictly “all about seeds,” said Dr. Goldman, who was divorced. “I was single, Cary was married and we weren’t going there.”

They next saw each other at Svalbard in 2009, at the first-anniversary celebration of the seed vault. Dr. Goldman had brought seeds from Iowa to donate to it. Dr. Fowler spent much of the time tied up with interviews.

Photo

The reception in the bride’s apartment on Fifth Avenue.Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

“It was not conducive to getting to know anybody,” he said. But the two continued exchanging e-mails.

“We had substantive work to do,” he said. “It required a lot of discussions. I got a sense of her integrity, resolve, transparency — courage, even. Those things made me admire her.”

Then, in 2010, he abruptly became less involved in the seed exchange, and told Dr. Goldman that he had been distracted by a divorce from his second wife.

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Some months later, he was going to Bali for an intergovernmental meeting on plant genetic resources and invited Dr. Goldman to join him afterward.

“Our eyes were opening,” he said. “We were beginning to realize that an interesting person was standing right in front of us.” He recalled the meeting as being boring but, “Well, gosh, Bali itself was beautiful,” and it proved to be fertile ground for romance.

Yet each stayed where they were. Dr. Goldman said their relationship was able to survive long separations (over the last year they saw each other “maybe once a month”) because of the deep friendship that had developed between them. She also came to see in him a certain kindness and gentleness, and a sense of humor.

“I learned to trust him, so I think it just boils down to love and trust,” she said. “Add a bit of faith in there, too, like you have faith in a seed — Henry David Thoreau’s faith in a seed.”

“We really understand what motivates each one of us and what really drives us, because the other one feels the same thing,” he said. “If one of us were a plumber and the other a dentist, one might be able to empathize, but not so easily.”

They were married on April 28 on the terrace atop the Arsenal in Central Park. The officiant was Judge Guido Calabresi, a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a friend of Dr. Goldman’s late mother, the philanthropist Lillian Goldman.

The bride, in a beaded mermaid-tail gray satin dress by Kim Hicks, carried a bouquet of sweet peas and lily of the valley as she joined her bridegroom under a flower- and vine-draped trellis. Dr. Fowler’s sons, Martin, 19, and Thomas, 15, and Dr. Goldman’s daughter, Sara Arno, 19, flanked the couple.

“You, Amy, have an extraordinary sense of beauty,” Judge Calabresi said. “You, Cary, have an intellectual depth that is truly unique, and a sweetness of soul.”

Ms. Arno read the Mary Oliver poem “Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me,” explaining later that she had rejected poems with “love” in them because she thought it was too much a cliché. But she liked “rain” because “it inspires growth and it’s absolutely necessary.”

At the reception in Dr. Goldman’s apartment, Frank E. Loy, a former under secretary of state in the Clinton administration, toasted her sensuality and Dr. Fowler’s modesty, saying: “Cary introduced himself as a simple farm boy from Tennessee. I ask you, can you believe people like that?”

The singer Peter Cincotti sat down at the grand piano and turned the living room into a cabaret. He was joined by the actor Tony Danza, and the guests stood and craned their necks to watch them sing, prompting one guest, Dr. Richard Levine, to remark, “We’re at the Carlyle.”

The theme of the wedding was apples. At the end of the night, guests went home with brown paper bags containing a booklet on apples from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and several packets of heirloom tomato seeds. And a small apple pie.

Rosalie R. Radomsky contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2012, on Page ST13 of the New York edition with the headline: Amy Goldman and Cary Fowler. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe